Negative and positive reinforcement.

[bladespark]

I was reading a somewhat disturbing article about a church or possibly a cult that encourages physical discipline of children.

I had a discussion with a friend not too long about about punishment vs. reward. Punishment is held by many to be the best way to change a behavior. "If you disobey me, I shall do X to you." I have always held that reward is a better method.

If one looks as psychology, at the most basic level there are two ways to modify behavior. One is "reinforcement." Reinforcement is something you do to try and cause a behavior you wish. You can reinforce positively, by presenting a reward when a behavior is seen. (I had a teacher in elementary school who did this. She gave us little things, like glue sticks or pencils, when we did something particularly well.) You can also reinforce negatively by removing something unpleasant when the behavior is seen. (You cleaned your room? How nice, I guess I won't make you eat your lima beans after all. Or whatever.) Punishment, on the other hand, is given when a behavior you don't like takes place. Punishment is entirely negative in focus. Punishment uses fear to try and get what it wants, and the trouble with fear is that fear is a very complex emotion. Pleasure is simple. We enjoy something, we seek it. Fear is more complicated. We fear something, we may have one of any number of responses to this.

Animal tests on reinforcement/punishment have demonstrated this quite clearly. Here's a bit from the wikipedia on the subject. "Punishment is not a mirror effect of reinforcement. In experiments with laboratory animals and studies with children, punishment decreases the likelihood of a previously reinforced response only temporarily, and it can produce other "emotional" behavior (wing-flapping in pigeons, for example) and physiological changes (increased heart rate, for example) that have no clear equivalents in reinforcement." What does this mean? It means that punishment isn't terribly effective in changing behavior, especially when that behavior has already been rewarded in some way.

Sometimes negative reinforcement and punishment get confused. But negative reinforcement is different. In negative reinforcement there is a situation or condition which the subject finds unpleasant, and when the subject behaves as desired, that unpleasant whatever is removed. Punishment is when an unpleasant whatever is added after the undesirable behavior has taken place.

Or to give a simple example here, if you want to train a kid , and you give him extra chores every time he does something bad, the effectiveness of this strategy is going to be erratic, to say the least. But if you give him a regular schedule of chores, and let him off of some when he's good, then you'll get better results.

It also means that flipping hitting children does NOTHING to teach them. It may work temporarily, but it wears off, causes fear, resentment, and other emotional responses, screws up people's emotional development, and just generally is BAD, BAD, BAD.

I had really thought that in this day and age most people knew better! My grandparents spanked my parents when they were little, but my parents learned better. We KNOW better now! Anybody who's studied the subject at all (and parents flipping ought to!) should know that it doesn't work. But it seems like not. In fact it seems like VERY not. What is wrong with people that they think hitting kids is ever justified? It doesn't teach them, it doesn't improve them, it just makes them afraid and screwed up! The only thing that hitting a child does is it makes the adult feel in control of the situation, big and powerful, and anybody who gets off on that kind of power kick with children ought to be shown what it's like to be on the receiving end of some punishment.

(Note that I don't advocate removal of all forms of punishment with kids ever. I mean sometimes you do have to teach a kid that actions have consequences. But punishment really is far, far, far less effective then reinforcement, and if you are going to punish, physical punishment is NEVER the best choice.)

Comments

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

Just to confuse you even more, there's positive punishment and negative punishment, along with positive and negative reinforcement, on the scientific side.

Don't want to start a debate, suspect we probably MOSTLY agree, and it's your journal, so I hate to bring it in, but... yeah. (Hitting =/= spanking, spanking may have a place with some children, particularly in the sense of a (gentle)swat on the butt of a toddler who is too young to understand more abstract punishments like extra chores or removing privleges- all moot, of course, as I don't have kids. :P)

That said, have heard creepy things about Remnant from my cousin who lives in Nashville.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I can understand the occasional swat. *nods* But it's a very fine line between spanking and abuse sometimes, and I personally would prefer to stay waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over there away from both of them, lest I find myself creeping up to the line.

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

*nod*

I've been thinking about aversives in the use of behavioral training- for both dogs and people (specifically autistic kids and sometimes adults in behavioral therapy stuff) a lot lately- I think because of the whole professional trainer thing. I'm NOT a pure-positive trainer but I feel it's important to both use a minimum amount of aversives, and be able to justify WHAT aversives you use. When I can't do that any longer, it's time to stop training.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* You probably know more about it than I do then. But it's annoying that a lot of parents haven't got the least idea of how behavior modification really works. Application is harder than theory, of course, but one ought to be at least familiar with the theory, I think.

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

True. And it's not like psychology isn't a VERY common class in basic university courses, and behaviorism is covered in most psych 101 clases....

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

It seems to go in one ear and out the other with some people though. It's interesting how folks can study something, and not actually link it through to applications.

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

Yup. Of course, going from a mouse in a clicky box to kids might be sort of a leap for most people who can't manage to figure out how to install AdAware or that they really HAVEN'T inherited a million dollars from their obscure and previously unknown uncle in Nigeria.....

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Pfft! Yeah. I sometimes have to wonder about people who fall for that one. Or people who get phished. I'd never heard of phishing, but the first time i got an e-mail telling me my paypal account had been suspended, and I needed to log in and fix it NOW, I kind of eyed it funny.

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

Heh.

Given that you're still awake, can I bug you for an opinion on a (non-furry) piece of art? Trying to get reactions to it- it's boring commercial art for a business logo. :P

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v27/corgitails/dogstar_academy/testcolor_goblin.jpg

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Looks pretty good to me. What kind of opinion are you after, really? Color? Style? Technical? I assume this isn't a finished piece yet?

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

It's not done, but mostly what I'm looking for is initial reactions- it's supposed to be folk-art-ish, southwestern style and I'm thinking I may do the final version as a block print, actually, rather than digitally.

Color reactions would also be useful, but since this is a draft and digital colors are so weird.... Anything useful you can give me will help, at this point. :P

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Ah. It definitely looks folk art, so that's right spot on. Colors look good too, though the sky gradient is a little too slick to my eye, given the other solid color blocks you've got, but doing it in real media will fix that. Tiny tweak that I might suggest, just because it bugs me, is the way the point of the scarf is very centered. Shift it to be a bit more forward, perhaps?

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

Hrm... would you have it centered on his neck or more forwards towards his chest?

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

More forwards towards the chest. I think it's just kind of... too geometric and not like a scarf to have it exactly centered.

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

Cool, thank you. :)

[jilinn.livejournal.com]

As a parent, I can give experianced insight on this. I was spanked as a child, as were my parents, grandparents..etc on back who knows how long. None of us have suffered psychological damage from it, or fear and resentment. No, I didn't like it, but I think in the long run it taught me the difference between right and wrong a lot faster than only positive reinforcement. Do something bad, get your butt whupped, don't do bad thing again. Very simple, very effective. I have a son of my own now and yes when he does good he gets rewards, but if he does something bad, he gets a spanking. I, as well as his teachers have tried only positive reinforcement with him and it simply does not work. His behavior did not change and in fact sometimes got worse. I do not get off or have any kind of power trip, or feel any more in control of him when I spank him. I do it because so far it is the only thing that has any effect on his behavior. I don't agree with abusing children, but even the bible states "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and I believe that a lot of the problems with todays younger people stems from the rod being spared. I am not trying to start a fight with anyone, this is simply my view and experiance as a parent.

[beetlecat.livejournal.com]

I have learned that raising a dog is amazingly similar to raising a human. Both respond well to the same tactics and tricks. I will watch a parenting show and think 'wow, I trained my dog the same way.'

House training for example. If the puppy pees on the carpet and you smack him and put him outside. What he learn is "Don't let me catch you peeing inside or you'll get punished." He does not learn to pee outside, because you have not shown him that is what you want.

If puppy pees inside and you put him outside and praise him when he pees, then he learns that he just did something wonderful and will want to do it again.

Children work the same way. And, just like dogs, kids are different and some require different methods of training. You can raise 2 wonderful children but the 3rd is a brat, because you try to use the same tactics on him, without looking to see if they're working or not.

Some kids need some physical punishment to get the point across. Some only need the threat. And some cower just at the thought. You really have to be open and willing to change parenting methods best suited for each child.

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

I don't necessarily agree, I think there's a place for physical punishment in raising children.

I think it depends on the child's age and maturity. Children need to learn to project in time, just like animals and when they're young they don't correlate action and future punishment. You can't promise a future punishment (even "no lima beans in 2 hours at dinnertime") in response to current behaviour. Infants respond to emotions and angry voices so there's no need for physical punishment, but at the age of two, they lose that but they don't yet have a solid grasp of temporal space. So hitting them (very rarely and very gently) in cases of extreme misbehavior is OK. Time-outs or other direct punishment (taking away toys, etc.) also works and is less abusive. But punishment is important. By five, they should have some grasp of the "if you do this, this will happen" concept and then things can proceed as discussed above and be a reward-based system.

All of this also requires a very close relationship between parent and child. If the child is craving attention, and any (even negative) attention is a reward of sorts, then you've got problems from the get go.

I think from age 6 onwards, I was raised under the rights/responsibilities system. That is there was a sliding scale of responsibilities (good behavior, chores, financial responsibility, schoolwork) and if I demonstrated that I could regularly and without prompting fulfill them, I got more rights (TV time, staying up late, allowance, going out with friends). The pinnacle of rights was the right to have my opinions matter in making family decisions. I got to the point where the one thing I was deathly afraid of was disappointing my parents.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

While I see the need for limits I think they need to be explained - "because I said so" teaches nothing but bullying, might makes right and autocracy. I also see no point in violence - controlling your kids through fear of pain really weirds me out. I mean, you say to someone "I want to control someone by hurting them until they obey me" and they usually freak. Why does it change because the victim is a child?

I remember when my brother's friend was hit by his father for fighting - the kid said he hit the other kid because he was angry with him. I thought at the time that he's only copying what dad did - dad was angry with him so hit him. Why shouldn't he do the same?